sábado, octubre 04, 2008

I have been using Scrum for Team System since beta 1 and I quickly fell in love with that template. It reflects the way we were working, however, there was a big gap in the process, specially when planning for a sprint, we usually did all the prioritizations, sizing, assigning and breakdown of Product Backlog Items using other tools like Mindmanager, Excel or sticky notes.

Recently the guys from Conchango, creators of the template, released a beta of a tool that will help use fill that gap. It's a cool WPF tool that will interact with TFS and allow us to create and edit sprint backlog items.

I don't think the tool will replace Mindmanager and the whiteboard still will be an indispensable resource, but I don't think I would like to go back to Excel to edit my items (well lets see how it goes after a couple of sprints of working with it).

When I was looking at the tool I was thinking, mmm yes, you can move a task from In Progress to Done, that's cool, but excel can do much more specially with pivot tables and reports, but then I saw the rest of the features, like changing to Planning Mode to start adding Product Backlog Items, automatically doing the binding between product backlogs and sprint backlog items, searching, filtering and reporting and I have to say, this tool is something worth to try. So in two weeks I'll let you know more about this.

I'm still not sure about the pricing scheme and I'm a bit concern. At the moment is beta, and you can simply request a license, but it doesn't seem something that will remain free. I will need to consider if this is a tool that every developer on the team will be able to use.